3 Film Series to Catch in N.Y.C. This Weekend

Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.

BAMCINEMAFEST at BAM Rose Cinemas (through July 1). This annual platform for indie cinema always offers a provocative lineup, combining some of the best movies from Sundance and South by Southwest with world premieres of titles that often seem too out there for those events. The first week’s highlights include Andrew Bujalski’s workplace dramedy “Support the Girls” (on Friday), in which the terrific Regina Hall plays the manager and fulcrum of camaraderie at a Hooters-like Texas sports restaurant; Aaron Schimberg’s conceptual but sweet “Chained for Life” (on Sunday), with Jess Weixler as an actress cast opposite a co-star who has a facial deformity (Adam Pearson, from “Under the Skin”); “Shirkers” (on Monday), a sort of memoir-mystery in which the filmmaker Sandi Tan revisits a movie she made in Singapore in the early 1990s and the circumstances that followed the shoot; and “Crime + Punishment,” a documentary that trails New York Police Department officers as they challenge quota-based policing, which they say persists even though it has been banned. (The Sunday screening is sold out; BAM will hold an encore screening on July 1.)718-636-4100, bam.org

ESSENTIAL LIZ at the Quad Cinema (through June 29). Having trouble sorting through the Quad’s 20-film series on the best of Elizabeth Taylor? Try an unofficial double bill of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (on Saturday and Monday) and “Secret Ceremony” (on Tuesday and Thursday), two very different films that nevertheless share a theme; in both, Ms. Taylor plays a childless woman compelled, partly because of that childlessness, to engage in private role-playing games with another person. Mike Nichols’s 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Woolf” casts Ms. Taylor and Richard Burton, to whom she was famously married at the time, as the bickering George and Martha. In Joseph Losey’s lean and allusive “Secret Ceremony,” Ms. Taylor becomes a surrogate mother to a young woman (Mia Farrow, in the same year as “Rosemary’s Baby”) who resembles her dead daughter. Elsewhere, Vincente Minnelli’s “The Sandpiper” (on Saturday and Monday), the first Taylor-Burton movie released after they were married for the first time, is a spikier and less hoot-worthy film than its reputation as camp suggests, though, admittedly, it includes a scene of pillow talk between Ms. Taylor (as a bohemian artist) and Mr. Burton (as the minister and school headmaster who falls for her) in which she delivers her dialogue with a bird on her head.212-255-2243, quadcinema.com

‘WALKER’ at the Metrograph (June 22, 6:45 p.m.; June 24, 10 p.m.). Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) directed this 1987 satire about William Walker (Ed Harris), an American colonialist who in the 1850s invaded Nicaragua and named himself president. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby said that the movie makes a “flip, irreverent, sparely made and unkindly persuasive” case that Mr. Walker’s invasion established an era in United States-Latin American relations that continued through to the then-current Iran-contra affair. Not all critics were as enthusiastic as Mr. Canby (Roger Ebert awarded it zero stars out of four), but the film, which is rife with deliberate anachronisms and features music by Joe Strummer, still has its champions.212-660-0312, metrograph.com